Posted on 11/10/2005 1:22:46 PM PST by qam1
America should prepare for a big fat war between the generations. It’s going to be ugly.
On one side is the baby boom generation, which retires and claims a ton of government benefits. On the other are younger workers, forced to fund those benefits plus pay the bills their elders left them.
When the war comes, the Federal Reserve chairman will have to be a general. That person will likely be Bush nominee Ben Bernanke. The question is, for which side will he fight?
Outgoing Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan tried to represent both sides. He supported the Bush tax cuts.
This gave comfort to today’s taxpayers, who chose not to charge themselves for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the new Medicare drug benefit and the quarter-billion-dollar bridge to nowhere.
Last spring, Greenspan did service for the other side. “I fear that we may have already committed more physical resources to the baby boom generation in its retirement years than our economy has the capacity to deliver,” he said.
One solution would be to ramp-up means-testing for Medicare, the health insurance plan for the elderly. Greenspan would reconfigure the program “to be relatively generous to the poor and stingy to the rich.”
The political reality is that the baby boom generation expects to see the nice government handouts its retired parents enjoyed, and then some. Younger workers expect to be taxed at today’s lower rates. One group will be very disappointed — or perhaps both groups — because there is no way the Candyland economics of today can go on.
The whole alarming future is nicely mapped out in a book, “The Coming Generational Storm,” by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, a personal-finance columnist at The Dallas Morning News.
Kotlikoff and Burns clearly sympathize with younger Americans and Americans not yet born, who will be paying both our bills and their own. “Does it feel better,” the authors write, “if those unknown victims of our rapacity are someone else’s children and the children of those children and the children of those children of those children?”
Sounds like war to me. Kotlikoff and Burns try to be meticulously nonpartisan, but I won’t. Though the irresponsible policymaking spanned decades, today’s mad deficits rush us closer to disaster. Democrats are not shy about pushing for retiree benefits, but at least they consider raising taxes to pay for them. Not the current crowd, whose spend-and-borrow strategy is the 1919 Versailles Treaty of this-century America: an unstable setup that guarantees future conflict.
The scam is that the tax cuts are not really wiping the nation’s slate clean of tax obligations. When spending exceeds tax revenues, the difference must be borrowed. That debt does not disappear. It gets paid for, with interest, by someone’s taxes. So the Bush cuts simply move the taxes from one generation of shoulders to another.
Bernanke would certainly come to the Fed job with good credentials. Head of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, he formerly chaired the Princeton economics department. Bernanke seems OK, but other candidates were more upfront about deficits.
One was Martin Feldstein, President Ronald Reagan’s top economic adviser. Feldstein drew flak for criticizing the Reagan deficits. The Bush White House wouldn’t want to hear that kind of thing. Anyway, there’s no need to worry about making ends meet when you can use the next generation’s credit card.
Another Republican contender for the Fed job was Larry Lindsey. He was fired as a Bush adviser in 2002, after predicting that the war in Iraq would cost up to $200 billion, a figure already passed. Lindsey did not understand: One simply does not talk price in the Bush administration.
Given the president’s tendency to give top jobs to those closest, we can give thanks that he did not nominate his banker brother. Neil Bush played a major role in the Silverado Savings & Loan fiasco of the 1980s, which cost taxpayers $1 billion.
Or perhaps the president was doing the big-brotherly thing in protecting Neil from a job sure to be filled with strife.
The person who heads the Fed in the next decade will be trying to steer the nation through the perfect economic storm. Good luck to the new chairman, and to all the generations.
True, the problem is they were still doing the same thing in 1970 as they were doing in 1965.....
You've been hoisted by your own petard, missyme.
You were banned. You shouldn't come back with a new nic and expect not to be found out.
Good. You recognize that you shouldn't be eating that stuff. If it is going in your mouth, you must be putting it there.
How many children suffer with Diabetes now a days? Eating healthy should be government policy by allowing healthy foods to be affordable to the American family with children.
Diabetes comes in two principal flavors. Type I is generally recognized as being an auto-immune disease provoked by a 'leaky gut' that permits bovine milk proteins to pass into the blood stream. The human immune system mounts an defense against this foreign protein that results in attacking the pancreas. Onset is usually observable around age 5 and requires insulin injections for life to compensate. It is a genetic defect that has little to do with diet.
Type II diabetes is provoked by a continuous intake of too many carbohydrates. The body is constantly secreting insulin to deal with the intake. The observable consequences include lots of fat storage. Internally, the patient becomes insensitive to the natural insulin produced by the body. This leaves blood sugar levels at damaging, high levels. The red blood cell walls become rigid in this environment, thus can no longer pass through fine capillaries. The consequences are diabetic neuropathy (numbness and necrosis in fingers and toes) and insufficient blood flow to the eyes. Damage to the eyes is further impaired by creation of Advanced Glycosolated Endproducts. AGEs are little blobs of protein and sugar that clog the very fine blood vessels in the eyes causing progessive blindness.
All this can be avoided by not shoving tons of carbohydrates in your mouth and getting some exercise. It doesn't require any action at all by the government.
If you have studied anything about the marketplace, the very act of government intervention in the form of price controls results in shortages. The 1973 oil crisis was caused by that very mechanism.
On my last trip to the supermarket in Idaho, I observed all manner of healthy foods bearing labels of "WIC Approved". WIC is a government food subsidy program for low income people. The process is in place, yet ignorant people continue to shove trashy food in their mouths while rotting in front of a TV set. There is a small matter of personal responsibility in this issue.
Amazing...Fist you accuse me of being somoene you hate or are jealous of? plus you seem to tell me how old I am in addition to my writing skills. Is your 2nd job-Fortune Teller?
My friends have teenage girls that are not pregnant because they are using birth control pills and are involved in a relationship with a b/f. It truly is no skin off your nose, and you should be glad another young girl is not pregnant having to collect state aid.
you are delusional..
But I met some very nice people here, so I won't let you and your insults drive me away.
LBJ made no attempt to win. He let MacNamara throw our people into the grinder and wasted most of our stock of bombs on empty South Vietnamese countryside. We should have mined Haiphong harbor and bombed Hanoi. That would have rapidly put the north at a disadvantage. LBJ and his administration had no interest in winning the war.
The Catholic church sanctioned the Rhythm Method and they should have used that.
If, as you claim, that her husband was a strict adherent to the Catholic proscription against barrier methods of birth control and the pill, their eldest child, when she died, was 11, then they had been married for, at the most, 12 years. It takes 40 weeks, or so, for each pregnancy. Your aunt had six live births in 12 years. Ergo, it is IMPOSSIBLE for her to have had twenty-seven abortions during that period of time. JUST DO THE MATH!
If I were you, pet, I'd worry a whole LOT more about Jesus judging you, than what will ever happen to me. Bearing false witness is against the Ten Commandments; missyme. ;^)
I agree with you on this issue. I have always been concerned with what is served to children in school cafeterias, but with different lunch programs they now have enacted this might be a good change.
I only shop at whole foods markets and buy hormones free meats it's expensive but I think well worth it.
Nopardons- As I told you she had 6 children the first one being born in 1955 the last one being born in 1966 (June)
Feb 1967 she died.
Her abortions were prior to 1955. BC Pills were available but when she thought of taking them it was to late.
What math are you having trouble with?
Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.. I am sure you have heard this one.
I told you I am not Missy, but I see whatever she did to you which must be massive, since you called her a pathetic Skank, wonder what Jesus would think of that?
We're footing the bills the "greatest Generation" left us and paying for their Medicare and Paid Prescriptions. Old "I love Stalin" Roosevelt started this Socialist Security stuff and IIRC Jophnson spent it all on his Socialist programs. Seems only fair we should pass on the "favor" ;-)
You think that it's a good thing, for teens to have sex? WHY?
Is it sex with birth control or kids having babies to you and nothing else? You never heard of abstinence?
Tsk, tsk, tsk...
abstinence?
Yes.. heard of it,I am sure you have too. That is not the point. YOU have no control over what someone might do, kids will do what they want no matter how much time you spend telling them NO....what would you rather have a daughter who was going to have sex be protected? or tell her No don't have sex, she does anyways and has a unwanted pregnancy?
Usually people especially women who have such a sharp tounge twoards another woman is usually done out of jealousy.
You should let GOD into your heart, maybe then you will know how to be nicer and kinder to people.
Birth control pills weren't available to the general populace in 1955.
Her husband was okay with her having abortions, but not with any birth control method, even one accepted by the Catholic church? Is that what you're telling me? Did she have multiple abortions before she was married?
This story has so many holes in it, that I suggest that you at least try to concoct your stories in a somewhat better, more cogent method, prior to posting them.
I wonder what Jesus would have to say about your constant befuddled lying.
Oh puleeeeeeeeeeeeezes. First, take care of yourself, pet.
Lying??? you are a very foolish woman. My mother suffered greatly watching her sister die at the young age of 37.
Abortions were done by a woman who created a solution as a douche consisting of lysol, castille soap, and saline after she inserted this solution which for my aunt was 27 DIFFERENT TIMES she would send her home tell her to jump around, etc, hours later my aunt develpoed horrible cramps and expelled the fetus.
The time it did not take was in 1967, after the solution had been inserted she had to go to her OB/ Dr lamar and beg him to complete the abortion and he did. I could care less if you don't believe this, I was young when all this was going on but I saw my mother and grandmother suffer a great deal during this time.
Was her husband was wrong damn wrong he was,never married after she died and has live in a great shame to this day.....
Oh heck, murderers are going to kill anyway, so perhaps we should give them all the best weapons we can.
Thieves are going to steal anyway, so let's just give away your money; shall we?
Some children would rather eat ice cream than veggies; how about we just let them do that? NO? Why not?
Many teens are going to cheat on test, so, is that okay? After all, they're going to do it anyway...aren't they?
There is no such word as anyways".
No, dear, "jealousy" is never the reason someone gets corrected/laughed at/though an idiot here. But your projection complex is very interesting.
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